Collaborative publishing website Medium, which aims to reinvent the blog, secures first external investmentMedium, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams's online publishing venture, has no shortage of ambition – to reinvent the blog as a digital storytelling format and match the impact of the microblogging service, no less.Williams, who launched Medium in August 2012 with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, has said their aim is "re-imagining publishing in an attempt to make an evolutionary leap" by building a new platform from scratch that would put an emphasis on ideas, stories and collaboration. To achieve this, however, the company will have to get over several hurdles, not least addressing the confusion over Medium's perceived strategy and business model, summed up by Reuters media commentator Jack Shafer, who describes it – while not lacking potential – as up to now being "a mystery wrapped up in a hashtag concealed by a catchy URL".This uncertainty has clearly not put off investors: Medium, which employs 50 full-time staff, announced last week that it had secured its first external investment, a $25m funding round led by Greylock Partners, with participation from Google Ventures and individual investors. Initial funding for the platform came from Williams's investment vehicle The Obvious Corporation.Perhaps this enthusiasm shouldn't be a surprise. As well as co-founding Twitter, Williams launched blog publishing service Blogger in 1999 and Medium is, ostensibly, similar – with... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2014-02-02 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Fans of Rupert Murdoch's musings on Twitter can now share his thoughts with their friends this festive season. No, the Times isn't publishing a Christmas supplement compiling its owner's thoughts – New York artist Michelle Vaughan has produced letterpress cards featuring a selection of his... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2013-12-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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I can't repeat my Ipso facto joke yet again. But there, I just did. The announcement that almost all of the major publishers have signed up to fund the Independent Press Standards Organisation, and agreed therefore to be regulated by it, is hardly a shock.But Paul Vickers, the Trinity Mirror... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2013-12-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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By using images in tweets, publications like The Atlantic, Grantland, Slate and Wired are turning tweets into the kind of story previews readers already see on Facebook, the front page of a newspaper or in the contents section of a magazine.The post Publishers Get Traffic Boost From Twitter... Continue reading at Digiday
[ Digiday | 2013-11-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Six years and 900 pages on, there ended up being two million reasons why this first-time author would have been glad to have stuck with the written word. Continue reading at The Sydney Morning Herald
[ The Sydney Morning Herald | 2013-11-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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IBM is alleging that Twitter has infringed on its patents, including one that would seem to give the computing giant status as an inventor of online advertising.Revealed in a Twitter filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission this morning, IBM is claiming that Twitter has infringed on at... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2013-11-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Most startups will never see anything close to the amount of money Twitter plans on raising during its IPO this week (a reported $1.6 billion) and in fact, three out of four tech businesses fail. Entrepreneurs in training looking to create a successful company, then, might want to know what... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-11-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Twitter's Ev Williams started Medium to simplify and socialize online article writing, but the service's invitation-only nature has kept many folks on the sidelines. Today, things are opening up: Medium's now accessible to anyone willing to sign into Twitter and verify an email address. Would-be ... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2013-10-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Hot Key Books is to publish a debut by 18-year-old Isobel Harrop, after publisher Emily Thomas... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2013-10-23 00:00:00 UTC ]
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When it comes to referral traffic from social networks, there's Facebook and Pinterest — and then there's everyone else. Facebook accounted for more than 10% of overall traffic to publishers in September, by ... Continue reading at Editor & Publisher
[ Editor & Publisher | 2013-10-16 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Ed Nawotka examines the publishing industry's changing relationship with data and how that might or might not impact the way publishers acquire and sell books. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2013-10-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The CEO of HarperCollins U.K. talked about taking his new job and how he plans on taking HC into the future. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2013-10-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Stanford Law School Fellow Vivek Wadhwa, whose criticism of Twitter's all-make board sparked a weekend debate on the social network, took to Bloomberg TV with his arguments on Monday. "They are a small elite group I call 'The Mafia' who are stuck in the echo chamber," said Wadhwa, who is... Continue reading at Silicon Valley Business Journal
[ Silicon Valley Business Journal | 2013-10-08 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The content on Scribd, the San–Francisco based startup that aims to create the digital library of the future, is available on a range of devices, from laptops to smartphones to tablets. But CEO Trip Adler tells Fast Company we won't be reading e–books in our hands in the future––they'll be... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-10-07 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Four months after introducing video, Instagram took the natural next step today, telling its over 150 million users their streams would soon include ads too.The company, acquired by Facebook for $736 million in 2012, announced the development in a short blog post it published Thursday afternoon.... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2013-10-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Retirement means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For Steven Soderbergh, it has meant, turning his attention away from directing theatrical releases at a breakneck pace, and working on any number of other projects instead. One such project involved writing a novella on... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-09-26 00:00:00 UTC ]
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@Horse_ebooks is the Twitter account that, until today, spewed frequent bouts of eerily poetic nonsense to more than 213,000 followers: @Horse_ebooks was widely believed to be a Twitter bot whose tweets were sent out by a robot that scraped text from obscure parts of the Internet. That is, until... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-09-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Twitter is quite the medium. An endless source of looping GIFs, "viral" videos, and, sadly, bad advertising. Most of the latter category is quickly dismissed by the block and report spam features of Twitter, but the occasional spambot elevates its "craft" to a level of surreal bliss which begs... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2013-09-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Google's got an ad exchange. So does Facebook. Twitter is said to be working on one too. But in the meantime, the company has just purchased MoPub, a burgeoning mobile ad exchange business. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. MoPub has built an ad exchange through which mobile publishers... Continue reading at AdWeek
[ AdWeek | 2013-09-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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JCDecaux has launched a Twitter-driven book club to connect with commuters and use its digital screens in stations to enhance commuters' journeys. Continue reading at Media Week
[ Media Week | 2013-08-29 00:00:00 UTC ]
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